Periods in American Art
Native American
1. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, many native peoples populate North America. They speak
countless languages and follow diverse patterns that are adapted to, and vary with, their
environments. In some areas—such as the Northeast—they begin to group into more centralized
political structures, while in the South, with the weakening of the important Mississippian centers,
populations disperse into smaller communities. The arrival of Europeans at the end of the century,
followed by the coming of fishermen, fur traders, gold seekers, and colonists, alters Native American
lifeways forever. Contacts between Europeans and Native Americans increase during the following
century, particularly in the Northeast, where trade expands and the arts of the region begin a
period of integration of foreign elements into objects of everyday use. Such integration, in one
measure or another, occurs throughout the continent, the specifics varying with time, place, and
groups involved. New diseases, too, arrive with the Europeans, beginning a cycle of decimation that
will last until the nineteenth century.
Colonial Period
1. Europeans colonize North America in the early seventeenth century, motivated by religious and
economic goals. Spain and France, the two Catholic powers in Europe, lead the way, establishing
Santa Fe and Québec as their colonial capitals in North America, but Protestant England soon
follows along with other European nations such as Sweden and the Dutch Republic. Tens of
thousands of English migrants settle along the Atlantic seaboard of North America between 1607
and 1675; they occupy lands previously the territory of Native Americans in three major regions
known today as New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Chesapeake. The English bring distinct
traditions across the Atlantic with them, but their experience in the coastal colonies pushes them
into new modes of social life and material culture.
2. The first buildings in the colonies had irregular facades and were essentially postmedieval structures.
These small houses often consisted of two simple rooms. The decoration of these rooms reflected the
skill of the housewright, who embellished his labor—the house's primary structural timbers—with
basic woodworking tools.
3. By the turn of the eighteenth century, colonial elites emerge in the maturing colonies; plantation
owners in the South and the colonial merchants in the North stand out as leading patrons of the arts.
New Georgian-style (a) mansions are replete with Rococo furniture forms (b). Immigrant
portraitists seek commissions. The British colonies experience enormous population growth: the
mainland colonies have about 400,000 residents in 1720 and nearly 2 million by 1765. A population
explosion in Europe brings new waves of white migrants while the continued importation of
enslaved Africans (c) increases the number of blacks. An expanding engagement with the British
empire brings British manufactured goods, fostering a new identity as Britons. Wealthy Americans
travel back seeking the cultural milieu of England and the Continent. However, those attachments
and the British desire to raise revenues to finance the operations of the empire generate a crisis
in the political relationship between the mother country and the colonists, one that eventually
ignites a war for independence.
a. Georgian design, which was characterized by an adherence to theories of order, symmetry,
and proportion drawn from classical models during the Renaissance, represented a significant
departure from earlier English decorative traditions. It stressed the importance of an ordered
facade and made extensive use of classical details like arches and columns copied from the
antique. Marmion displays Palladian ideas in its symmetrical five-bay facade and highly
decorative parlor.
b. Rococo is the name for one of the great international ornamental styles of the eighteenth
century. In its departure from classical order and symmetry, the Rococo scorned the rule and
the compass in favor of embellishment that required skillful freehand rendering and an
imagination that transcended the bounds of academic convention. The emphasis was on
naturalistic ornament, either carved or engraved. The style originated in Italy, flourished in
France beginning in the 1730s, in England in the 1740s, and in America in the 1750s. The
American adoption of the Rococo focused almost exclusively on the style's ornamental
motifs—shells and rocailles, scrollwork, acanthus leaves, and other flora and fauna, often in
symmetrical compositions. These were enthusiastically applied, by many leading urban
craftsmen, to architectural interiors, engravings, silver, furniture, and other domestic
equipage.
c. Ultimately, the international slave trade had lasting effects upon the African cultural
landscape. Areas that were hit hardest by endemic warfare and slave raids suffered from
general population decline, and it is believed that the shortage of men in particular may have
changed the structure of many societies by thrusting women into roles previously occupied
by their husbands and brothers. Additionally, some scholars have argued that images
stemming from this era of constant violence and banditry have survived to the present day in
the form of metaphysical fears and beliefs concerning witchcraft. In many cultures of West
and Central Africa, witches are thought to kidnap solitary individuals to enslave or consume
them. Finally, the increased exchange with Europeans and the fabulous wealth it brought
enabled many states to cultivate sophisticated artistic traditions employing expensive and
luxurious materials. From the fine silver- and goldwork of Dahomey and the Asante court to
the virtuoso woodcarving of the Chokwe chiefdoms, these treasures are a vivid testimony of
this turbulent period in African history.
4. After the American Revolution, a new federal government and federal culture emerge in the United
States of America. An innovative arrangement of sharing power between the electorate, the states,
and the national government is created with the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
Despite the acclaimed selection of George Washington as the first president of the United States,
political divisions remain between the northern and southern regions along with differing views of a
strong central governmental authority. Political parties soon emerge over these conflicts, but other
efforts focus on how to build a new nation. Patrons and artists also devise a distinctive nationalist
culture around Neoclassical principles (a), looking to the ancient republics of Greece and Rome for
inspiration for their new republic.
a. The Neoclassical style arose from such first-hand observation and reproduction of antique
works and came to dominate European architecture, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts.
Travelers were also important students of Roman and Greek antiquity. In the early eighteenth
century, painted visions of Greco-Roman monuments already could be found in continental
palaces and English country homes. Soon, persons of culture and sensibility known to the
Italians as cognoscenti were descending upon the peninsula to embark on the Grand Tour.
The concept of ideal forms descended from Platonic texts and had been the theme of
commentators since the Renaissance, but Winckelmann's proselytizing won new adherents.
"The most eminent characteristic of Greek works," he wrote, "is a noble simplicity and sedate
grandeur in gesture and expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming
surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures." These artists,
together with Joseph-Marie Vien, Benjamin West (i), Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Angelica
Kauffmann, made up the first generation of Neoclassical painters. They defined the style
with their emphasis on formal composition, historic subject matter, contemporary settings
and costumes, rigidity, solidity, and monumentality in the spirit of classical revival.
i. Benjamin West's influence on the course of American painting was enormous, and it
is certain that without him the achievements of most of the major American artists of
the time would not have been possible. Born on October 10, 1738, near Springfield,
Pennsylvania, West manifested a talent for painting at an early age, and was
encouraged to draw by his parents. By the age of fifteen he was something of a local
celebrity for his portraits, and by 1756 he had attracted the attention of Dr. William
Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia, who enrolled him in his school and
devised a special program in classical learning for him. His lessons in antiquity fueled
his determination to become a history painter, and in 1760 he sailed for Italy on a
journey that would lead him to the pinnacle of artistic success.
The first American artist to study in Italy, West painted assiduously and embraced the
embryonic Neoclassical movement then developing over all of Europe. He met the
right people—the antiquities scholar Cardinal Albani, the painter Anton Raphael
Mengs, the historical genius Gavin Hamilton, among others—and, by the time he
reached London in 1763, was steeped in the newest artistic trends. His ability,
ambition, modernity, willingness to experiment, and social skills earned him
widespread patronage. West met King George III, who appointed him a charter
member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and by 1772 made him his historical
painter.
West's position at the top of the hierarchy of British painters, once achieved through
proximity to the king and his own grand historical tableau, was never in question. But
although he painted competitively and successfully, his greatest studio productions
were his many students. He fondly remembered his American upbringing and kept an
open-door policy for American artists traveling abroad, providing them not only with
a place to stay, but studio instruction, entrée into galleries and collections, and access
to the Royal Academy. His first student was his friend Matthew Pratt, who came to
London as an escort to West's fiancée Elizabeth Shewell. Pratt produced his nowfamous conversation piece, The American School (97.29.3), both in homage to West
and in order to make public his intention to achieve artistic independence: he
portrayed himself as a painter in a studio of younger students still at their drawing
boards.
The artists that followed in and out of West's studio comprise a who's who of
American painting: Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Ralph Earl,
Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, Samuel F. B. Morse, and many others. Peale
arrived at West's studio in 1767 and remained for two years, primarily painting
miniatures for his livelihood and admiring his master's grand-scale historical works,
while eschewing the sophisticated painterliness of the English manner. Working
together under West's tutelage, the extraordinarily talented painters Stuart and
Trumbull alternately praised and ridiculed their teacher. Allston stayed but a moment,
accepting West's hospitality as a means of grounding himself for subsequent studies
in Italy. Sully and Morse caught West in his declining years, when as president of the
Royal Academy he could offer his American students easy access to study at the
schools and fatherly guidance toward the finest English artists of the day. Sully
returned to America grateful to West, but painting in the manner of Sir Thomas
Lawrence, and his colleague Morse took West's encouragement of his historical
works to heart, never giving up his ambition to paint large, multifigure compositions
even when forced into portraiture by the exigencies of the American nineteenthcentury market.
West died in 1820, leaving a legacy not only of his own strong historical works, but
perhaps more importantly, a following of painters who represented his training and
counsel through the nineteenth century.
Post Revolutionary Period (1800-1870)
Important Events
1. Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 and the settlement of the lands beyond the Appalachian
Mountains.
2. Westward expansion fueled conflict with Native populations and led to their forced removal.
3. The regional cultures that had developed along the Atlantic Coast—New England, Middle Atlantic,
Chesapeake, and Carolinas—were transplanted into the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Wisconsin) and the Old Southwest (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri,
Tennessee, and Texas). But although Americans had begun to identify themselves as a nation, they
were divided by sectional interests that deepened with rapid industrialization and the question of
slavery.
4. Americans steadily achieved economic independence from Europe. Industrialists remade rural
villages into burgeoning factory towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, the center of cotton textile
manufacture. However, many textiles continued to be made in individual households and small
weaving workshops.
5. Government leaders and entrepreneurs campaigned for the construction of canals and railroads that
helped create a vast national market. Robert Fulton's steamboat, the opening of trade to China in
1785, and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825
6. The political calm that had characterized the first term of President George Washington (1732–1799)
was soon disrupted by the rise of party conflict between the Federalists, the Republicans, and the
eventual rise of the Democratic party (white male suffrage/Andrew Jackson)
a. Thomas Jefferson, War of 1812, Missouri Compromise
b. Foreign observers such as the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) remarked
on the democratic character of American society, where families moved frequently and
individuals were liberated from the restraints of tradition and hierarchy.
Artistic Trends
1. Many traditionally trained mechanics and other craftsmen who had expected to rise up the ladder
from apprentice to journeyman, and then master, found their social position threatened by these
developments. Furniture makers began to maintain well-stocked warehouses of Federal or
Neoclassical furniture. Wealth no longer derived exclusively from landownership. Urban families
with great fortunes from new sources-merchants, factory owners, financiers-patronized the
workshops of urban cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and other skilled craftsmen.
2. Cultural independence proved harder to achieve. Despite the great focus on nature in American
society, tastemakers continued to look abroad for classical and then revival styles (a). While folk
painters (b) roamed rural areas to provide portraits for middling Americans, the European tour and
grand historical themes remained critical to the work of academic painters and sculptors. At the same
time, new cultural institutions on home soil provided opportunities for artists to study and exhibit.
The artistic career of Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) is exemplary. He began as a rural portraitist,
took the Grand Tour of European capitals and art collections, and, upon returning to New York,
sought commissions for high-style portraits and historical studies. In 1825, he co-founded the
National Academy of Design and served as its first president.
a. In reaction to rapid urbanization, the spread of manufacturing and mechanization, the
massive influx of poor immigrants, and the Civil War, wealthy members of American society
embraced Romanticism, the reigning philosophy of the day, which urged a reexamination of
the "simple" ways of the past in order to find happiness in the more complicated present. The
many revival styles generated by this sensibility, such as Greek Revival, Gothic Revival,
Egyptian Revival, Rococo Revival, Renaissance Revival, and Neo-Grec, were widely
disseminated through pattern books and journals written for the cabinetmaker, builder, and
general reader. Some of these revival styles were only found in furniture design, while others
were used for a house's exterior and interior design as well.
i. Greek Revival architecture, especially popular in the 1820s and 1830s, spoke of
patriotism and American optimism at a time when the democratic system of the
young country. Gothic Revival houses were most often built in somewhat rural
settings, and were prescribed for scholarly gentlemen and members of the clergy.
Rococo Revival style, which was limited to interiors and furniture, was thought to be
elegantly French, and was the most popular style for the design of drawing rooms or
parlors (traditionally feminine rooms), no matter the exterior style of the house.
b. Many refer to folk art as plain, rural, provincial, outsider, idiosyncratic, or nonacademic—
terms that are all marred by implications of condescension and inferiority. At the
Metropolitan, we use the term "folk art" because it is traditional and recognizable, even if it
does not begin to characterize the diversity of artistic approaches and expressions it purports
to represent. No single term can meet that challenge.
Folk paintings are unified by conventions of method, aesthetics, and circumstance. The
artists worked principally in the Northeast, away from urban centers; most spent their careers
moving from place to place courting local audiences. Quite a few were highly trained
ornamental painters. Almost all of them favored strong colors, broad and direct application of
paint, patterned surfaces, generalized light, skewed scale and proportion, and conspicuous
modeling. Most developed compositional formulas that allowed them to work quickly, with
limited materials and in makeshift studios.
Portraiture was by far the most prevalent art form among itinerant painters in the American
Northeast. These artists spent their careers on the road, seeking commissions. While most
developed distinctive styles and artistic methods, all of their works betray the common
circumstances of their nomadic production in rural America, and all are indebted in some
measure to academic conventions. The poses, props, and settings for country portraits were
no different from those employed by artists in the cities. These portraits, however, are
restrained in every other respect. They are characterized by sharply defined forms, neatly
organized compositions with clearly defined spatial arrangements, some with an almost
mathematical precision and symmetry, generalized lighting, equal attention paid to all areas
of the canvas, an absence of expressive brushwork, and an overall flatness and linearity.
3. The Hudson River School was America's first true artistic fraternity. Its name was coined to
identify a group of New York City-based landscape painters that emerged about 1850 under the
influence of the English émigré Thomas Cole (a) (1801–1848) and flourished until about the time of
the Centennial. Because of the inspiration exerted by his work, Cole is usually regarded as the
"father" or "founder" of the school, though he himself played no special organizational or fostering
role except that he was the teacher of Frederic Edwin Church (b) (1826–1900). Along with Albert
Bierstadt (1830–1902), Church was the most successful painter of the school until its decline. After
Cole's death in 1848, his older contemporary Asher B. Durand (c) (1796–1886) became the
acknowledged leader of the New York landscape painters.
a. From the start, Cole's style was marked by dramatic forms and vigorous technique, reflecting
the British aesthetic theory of the Sublime, or fearsome, in nature. In the representation of
American landscape, really in its infancy in the early nineteenth century, the application of
the Sublime was virtually unprecedented, and moreover accorded with a growing
appreciation of the wildness of native scenery that had not been seriously addressed by Cole's
predecessors.
b. Church enjoyed the privilege and distinction of being Cole's student (1844–46), but
supplanted his teacher's literary and historical conceits with scientific and expeditionary
ones. Establishing his reputation with outsize depictions of North American scenic wonders
such as Niagara Falls, Church was stirred by the travel accounts and scientific tracts of the
German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt to journey twice to South America in the 1850s
and paint large-scale landscapes of the equatorial Andean regions that encompassed torrid to
frigid habitats in a single picture—the Earth in microcosm
c. Church's only serious rival was Albert Bierstadt, an émigré who returned to his native
Germany to study art at the Düsseldorf Academy. In 1866, Bierstadt was among the earliest
white visitors to Yosemite, and produced many large paintings of that region. He toured
many times in the West, as well as in Canada, Alaska, Europe, and the Bahamas, and
cultivated a large international clientele.
4. Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is regarded by many as the greatest American painter of the
nineteenth century. Born in Boston and raised in rural Cambridge, he began his career as a
commercial printmaker, first in Boston and then in New York, where he settled in 1859. He briefly
studied oil painting in the spring of 1861. In October of the same year, he was sent to the front in
Virginia as an artist-correspondent for the new illustrated journal, Harper's Weekly. Homer's earliest
Civil War paintings, dating from about 1863, are anecdotal, like his prints. As the war drew to a
close, however, such canvases as The Veteran in a New Field and Prisoners from the Front reflect a
more profound understanding of the war's impact and meaning. Women at leisure and children at
play or simply preoccupied by their own concerns were regular subjects for the artist in the 1870s. In
addition to expanding his mastery of oil paint during that decade, Homer began to create
watercolors, and their success enabled him to give up his work as a freelance illustrator by 1875. He
had been in Virginia during the war, and he returned there at least once during the mid-1870s,
apparently to observe and portray what had happened to the lives of former slaves during the first
decade of Emancipation.
Gilded Age (1870-1900)
Important Events
1. The United States solidified its place as an industrial and agricultural power in the late nineteenth
century. In the three decades following the Civil War, a nation once predominantly agricultural
became the world's preeminent economic power. Between 1869 and 1899, the nation's population
nearly tripled, farm production more than doubled, and the value of manufacturing grew sixfold.
While steel mills and oil refineries marked new industrial growth, older industries such as furniture
and silver manufacture operated large workshops with numerous workers. Great fortunes were made
in financing the railroads and other capitalist ventures; capital and labor alike experienced cycles of
boom and bust. Working-class women (mostly between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four) were
increasingly important to the industrial economy, filling jobs in textile factories and sweatshops.
2. The rise of the metropolis in the nineteenth century created a distinctive urban culture. Millions
moved from the countryside and overseas to become city dwellers; the urban population grew from 6
million to 44 million between 1860 and 1910. A steadily rising number of migrants from southern
and eastern Europe—Italy, Poland, Russia—settled in the cities. Popular entertainment venues such
as amusement parks, vaudeville theaters, and traveling shows promoted an urbane cultural vision
that was transmitted throughout the nation by popular periodicals. Department stores offering
inexpensive goods at set prices and mail-order catalogue companies spread the promise of
consumerism throughout the country. Cities grew into metropolitan areas with suburbs connected by
mass transit. Crowded downtown business districts grew upward as steel frame construction and
mechanical elevators made possible the construction of skyscrapers along the skyline.
Artistic Trends
1. Patrons promoted an American Renaissance to beautify the city with civic monuments, grand
mansions, and public sculptures. New public institutions of higher culture were established in
metropolitan centers; museums, libraries, opera companies, and symphony orchestras were built with
the support of private individuals who sought to educate the new urban immigrant Americans. The
art infrastructure matured with the establishment of museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in
1870. Artists and architects struggled to create an American style no longer dependent upon
European models.
2. The emerging corporate economy added to the ranks of the middle class with managers, accountants,
engineers, salesmen, and designers. The nineteenth-century ideal of the parlor as the center of
domestic culture began to weaken, under attack by a burgeoning feminist movement. Bright
independent women rebelled against the strictures of subordination within the family. Numerous
women's colleges opened in the 1870s and 1880s. The "New Woman" of the 1890s often sported a
college education and an independent identity. Professional decorators took charge of the domestic
interior, such as Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) who later became known for his glass
3.
4.
5.
6.
productions in the Art Nouveau style (a), and Candace Wheeler, who promoted art and design as
paying careers for women.
a. From the 1880s until the First World War, western Europe and the United States witnessed
the development of Art Nouveau ("New Art"). Taking inspiration from the unruly aspects of
the natural world, Art Nouveau influenced art and architecture especially in the applied arts,
graphic work, and illustration. Sinuous lines and "whiplash" curves were derived, in part,
from botanical studies and illustrations of deep-sea organisms. The unfolding of Art
Nouveau's flowing line may be understood as a metaphor for the freedom and release sought
by its practitioners and admirers from the weight of artistic tradition and critical expectations.
Painting styles such as Post-Impressionism and Symbolism (the "Nabis") shared close ties
with Art Nouveau and each was practiced by designers who adapted them for the applied
arts, architecture, interior designs, furnishings, and patterns
A series of grand world's fairs claimed an international stature for the United States and celebrated
the latest advances in science and technology. Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876 helped
to revive interest in the arts and crafts of colonial North America. The proliferation of poorly
designed mass-produced industrial goods in everyday life gave rise to the Aesthetic movement's
focus on the decorative arts and the Arts and Crafts movement's (a) promotion of handmade
products and artisan workshops. Both movements looked to medieval and Asian design sources and
encouraged women practitioners.
a. The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most
industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a
positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts
and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been
debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine
workmanship governed. The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style,
but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial
labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to
the division of labor and advanced the designer as craftsman.
American Barbizon School: Artists such as Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) and John Singer Sargent
(1856–1925) flocked to Paris in the later nineteenth century to paint modern subjects in innovative
ways. Some came away with depictions of landscapes and scenes of everyday middle-class life,
painted with the bright palette and natural light of the Impressionists. In 1886, William Merritt
Chase (1849–1916) became the first major American painter to create Impressionist canvases with a
series of images of New York's new urban parks. By the early 1890s, Impressionism was firmly
established as a valid style of painting for American artists. Even Weir was a convert. Most of the
repatriated American Impressionists lived in the Northeast, tapping into the cultural energy that was
increasingly concentrated in New York. Some of them taught in the new art schools that were a
consequence of the growing professionalism. The American Impressionists were much more
cosmopolitan than their French counterparts. Several were expatriates or spent long periods in
Europe; those who repatriated often crossed the Atlantic to attend exhibitions, visit museums, and
work in artists' colonies. While some American artists adopted only the surface effects of
Impressionism, simply to accommodate collectors' evolving taste, many of them shared the French
Impressionists' conviction that modern life should be recorded in a vibrant modern style. Their
works, like those of their French counterparts, appear to be infused not only with light and color but
with meanings inherent in the subjects they depicted.
Led by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), founder of the Prairie School, Chicago's architects strove
to shake off the European roots of Beaux-Arts and looked to the American landscape for inspiration.
The western landscape provided significant inspiration for artists and scholars alike, such as the
painter and sculptor Frederic Remington (1861–1909) and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner
(1861–1932). Vast tracks of western wilderness were set aside for national parks, often after coming
into public notice through the work of painters and photographers such as Albert Bierstadt (1830–
1902) and Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley.
Modern American Art (1900-Present)
1. The twentieth century is often referred to as the "American Century." During these years, the U.S.
emerges as one of two global superpowers, alongside the Soviet Union. A number of factors
contribute to the growth of U.S. political and economic domination in the world. First, like Canada
to the north, the U.S. possesses an enormous territory and vast natural resources. Second, these
resources, along with a large labor pool bolstered by immigrants, fuel the development of industry
and the creation of a middle class of consumers who buy manufactured goods with their wages. The
international political significance of the U.S. is confirmed by its decisive roles in the two world
wars.
2. As the United States emerges as an important world economic and political power, it also becomes
central to the international art scene, with New York usurping the preeminent role previously played
by Paris. At the beginning of the century, many American painters continue to work in a style
influenced by French Impressionism. By the nineteen-teens, greater realism prevails in the work of
the Ashcan School artists (a). The industrial and urban landscape that emerges in twentieth-century
North America is captured by many artists. Among those who celebrate factories and other industrial
forms are the Precisionist artists (b), including Charles Demuth (1883–1935), Charles Sheeler
(1883–1965), and Ralston Crawford (1906–1978). During the early decades of the twentieth century,
American artists also become more interested in organic and geometric abstraction (c), and begin
to embrace modernism, a tendency that continues as European artists emigrate to the U.S. around the
time of World War II.
a. About 1900, a group of Realist artists set themselves apart from and challenged the American
Impressionists and academics. The most extensively trained member of this group was
Robert Henri (1865–1929), who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
from 1886 to 1888 under Thomas Anshutz (1851–1912). Anshutz had himself studied at the
Pennsylvania Academy from 1876 to 1882 with Thomas Eakins, who had defied Victorian
decorum in his teaching principles and in his boldly realistic paintings. A second generation
consisted of Henri's New York students, of whom George Bellows (1882–1925) was the
most devoted. The term Ashcan School was suggested by a drawing by Bellows captioned
Disappointments of the Ash Can, which appeared in the Philadelphia Record in April 1915.
In their paintings as in their illustrations, etchings, and lithographs, Henri and his fellow
Ashcan artists concentrated on portraying New York's vitality and recording its seamy side,
keeping a keen eye on current events and their era's social and political rhetoric. Stylistically,
they depended upon the dark palette and gestural brushwork of Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals,
Francisco de Goya, Honoré Daumier, and recent Realists such as Wilhelm Leibl, Édouard
Manet, and Edgar Degas. They preferred broad, calligraphic forms, which they could render
"on the run" or from memory, thereby enlisting skills that most of them had cultivated as
newspaper illustrators. Although the Ashcan artists advocated immersion in modern
actualities, they were neither social critics nor reformers and they did not paint radical
propaganda. While they identified with the vitality of the lower classes and resolved to
register the dismal aspects of urban existence, they themselves led pleasant middle-class
lives, enjoying New York's restaurants and bars, its theater and vaudeville, and its popular
nearby resorts such as Coney Island. Because they avoided civil unease, class tensions, and
the grit of the streets, their works are never as direct or disturbing as those of their European
counterparts or of the reformist images of American photographers such as Jacob Riis.
b. The artists who came to be known as the Precisionists never formally organized themselves
as a group or issued a manifesto; instead, they were associated through their common style
and subjects. Around 1920, a number of artists in the United States began experimenting with
a highly controlled approach to technique and form. They consistently reduced their
compositions to simple shapes and underlying geometrical structures, with clear outlines,
minimal detail, and smooth handling of surfaces. Their paintings, drawings, and prints also
showed the influence of recent work by American photographers, such as Paul Strand, who
were utilizing sharp focus and lighting, unexpected viewpoints and cropping, and emphasis
on the abstract form of the subject. Artists such as Charles Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, Ralston
Crawford, and Louis Lozowick, as well as Demuth, distanced themselves from European
influences by selecting subjects from the American landscape and regional American culture.
These subjects included elements unique to early twentieth-century life, including urban
settings (particularly the dramatic engineering advances of skyscrapers and suspension
bridges) and the sprawling industrial locales of steel mills, coalmines, and factory complexes
c. The pictorial language of geometric abstraction, based on the use of simple geometric forms
placed in nonillusionistic space and combined into nonobjective compositions, evolved as the
logical conclusion of the Cubist destruction and reformulation of the established conventions
of form and space. Initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908–9, Cubism
subverted the traditional depiction relying upon the imitation of forms of the surrounding
visual world in the illusionistic—post-Renaissance—perspectival space. The High Analytic
Cubist phase, which reached its peak in mid-1910, made available to artists the planarity of
overlapping frontal surfaces held together by a linear grid. The next phase—Synthetic
Cubism, 1912–14—introduced the flatly painted synthesized shapes, abstract space, and
"constructional" elements of the composition. These three aspects became the fundamental
characteristics of abstract geometric art. The freedom of experimentation with different
materials and spatial relationships between various compositional parts, which evolved from
the Cubist practice of collage and papiers collés (1912), also emphasized the flatness of the
picture surface—as the carrier of applied elements—as well as the physical "reality" of the
explored forms and materials. Geometric abstraction, through the Cubist process of purifying
art of the vestiges of visual reality, focused on the inherent two-dimensional features of
painting.
3. Abstract Expressionism: A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York,
where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that
introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world's focus. Never a formal
association, the artists known as "Abstract Expressionists" or "The New York School" did, however,
share some common assumptions. Among others, artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912–1956),
Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Robert
Motherwell (1915–1991), William Baziotes (1912–1963), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett
Newman (1905–1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992), and
Clyfford Still (1904–1980) advanced audacious formal inventions in a search for significant content.
Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made
monumentally scaled works that stood as reflections of their individual psyches—and in doing so,
attempted to tap into universal inner sources. These artists valued spontaneity and improvisation, and
they accorded the highest importance to process. Their work resists stylistic categorization, but it can
be clustered around two basic inclinations: an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture, in contrast to
a reflective, cerebral focus on more open fields of color. In either case, the imagery was primarily
abstract. Even when depicting images based on visual realities, the Abstract Expressionists favored a
highly abstracted mode.
4. Pop Art/Postwar Prints: In 1940, the pioneering and innovative British printmaker Stanley William
Hayter arrived in New York from Paris, where he had opened an experimental print workshop called
Atelier 17. Like many fellow artists living in the French capital and elsewhere in Europe, Hayter
crossed the Atlantic seeking refuge from the harsh realities of war. While Hayter's experimental
techniques made a significant contribution to the medium, his most lasting legacy was his
enthusiasm for the original print. His passionate proselytizing encouraged a shift in thinking about
the print—from a medium valued for its reproductive capabilities to a medium capable of fostering
innovative artistic expression. By challenging prevailing notions of artistic subjectivity and
originality in their choices of subject matter and mediums, Johns and Rauschenberg helped to
remove the stigma once associated with printmaking. When traditional methods such as etching and
lithography no longer sufficed, artists turned to commercial print techniques not readily available at
fine art print shops in the early 1960s. Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James
Rosenquist discovered that commercial techniques such as silkscreen and offset lithography best
suited their large-scale work, which was drawn largely from mass media and consumer culture.
Warhol first experimented with silkscreen as early as 1962 in his works on canvas. Shortly
thereafter, he began to use his iconic images of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor
or familiar objects like Coca Cola and Campbell soup cans (1972.724.3) in his editioned prints.
While the ever-savvy Warhol established Factory Additions to print and publish his own work, other
artists turned to emerging publishers like Tanglewood Press and Multiples, Inc. to broadly distribute
their prints.
5. From the late 1960s, the Vietnam War and the protests it provokes, followed by the Watergate
scandal, the Arab Oil Embargo and resulting energy crisis, rampant inflation and recession in the
1970s, and concerns about the environmental consequences of industrialization, all combine to shake
American confidence. These events are paralleled in the arts by a growing skepticism about artistic
modernism and the emergence of the postmodern movement by the 1970s.
6. The political climate of the 1980s is relatively conservative in comparison with the 1970s, and
economic recovery begins in the middle of the decade. At the same time, innovations in computer
technology fundamentally change American life, touching every aspect of daily existence, including
work, communications, and leisure. Artists embrace new means of making and exchanging visual
images, for instance with ever-smaller and less expensive computers, more efficient compact disks,
and videotape. New media will offer an important field for artists through the end of the century.
Emerging technologies also create a "Tech Bubble" in which shares in computer-related companies
become the objects of stock market speculation. The inflated share prices begin to tumble in early
2000, spelling the end of a period of prosperity and low unemployment.
a. In contrast to the reticence and insularity of art influenced by Minimalism and
Conceptualism in the 1970s, much art of the 1980s assumed the form of public address—
from Jenny Holzer's use of the Times Square news ticker to broadcast elliptical and vaguely
threatening strings of text, to Krzysztof Wodiczko's night-time projections of symbolically
charged imagery onto the facades of museums, public buildings, and corporate headquarters.
The infamous "culture wars" that raged at the end of the decade—pitting conservative
politicians such as Jessie Helms against artists such as Andres Serrano and organizations like
the National Endowment for the Arts—reflected this increased visibility and the socially
directed nature of its subject matter: sexuality and identity, repression and power,
commodities and desire. Yet painting also returned with a vengeance after languishing in
relative obscurity during the 1970s, reasserting all the myths of originality and authenticity
that were under attack in the media-based works of the Pictures Generation from the same
moment.
b. As the decade mellowed under the lulling influence of the dot-com boom and the end of the
Cold War, the art of the mid-1990s reflected both the newly global situation and the
increasingly blurred line between the real and the virtual. Andreas Gursky's spectacular
large-scale photographs of frenzied stock markets, rock concerts, and designer shoe displays
were like advertisements for the zeitgeist: digitally punched up, relentlessly exteriorized, and
tailored for mass consumption. At the same time, however, Gabriel Orozco traveled the globe
making fragile, economical sculpture and photographs from the humblest of cast-off
materials—recycling the everyday into poetic objects that oscillated in the mind between
reality and the imagination
All information above was edited from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art
History which can be found at http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/index-north-america.html